My father was never one to complain. On the morning of the day he died, an ulcer he’d suffered from for years, and left untreated, ruptured and began to bleed. Two days later I met with the town coroner. He told me the end had been painless...
A holiday tradition in the Netherlands involving blackface has sparked a debate about race, the legacy of slavery, and the vestiges of colonialism. Emily Raboteau told the story in our Winter 2014 magazine.
Merwin’s awesome range, intensity, and feral strangeness are evident in a new two-volume Library of America edition, beautifully edited by J. D. McClatchy. Nearly 1,500 pages in all, it represents an oeuvre so large as to make Robert Lowell...
It is through Edwidge Danticat that Haiti emerges beyond the illusion, and her fiction and nonfiction open our eyes to the history and complexity of the island.
The title of Ron Rash’s compelling new collection of stories, Nothing Gold Can Stay, comes from Robert Frost’s evocative poem pondering the bittersweet knowledge of life’s impermanence.
First and second books of poems come in two general flavors. The first is an omnibus collection; it shows us a young poet’s series of attempts to find her own way into the craft. The second type of early collection is cohesive, since it...
It is the duty of the creator of any book app to assume that whatever sense of immersion we enjoy in a conventional book can be improved upon. More things to become immersed in, the logic goes, means more immersion, which means a better...
Offered up by blurbers with the best of intentions, the immediacy implicit in the description like a novel suggests that the book on hand can be engaged with as art rather than as fact, so realist it’s not real; a story rather than the...
Hockney’s entire production over the three decades since 1982 has been shadowed by death and in many ways can be seen as a direct response to all of that dying—a defiant celebration of life (“Love life!”) in the face of annihilation, the...
